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The colonel's face blanched. "You don't know that," he said.
"Clay Hatcher was here. He told me how you made him and Rufus Atkins lie about how my mother died."
"Listen, Flower, that was a long time ago. I made mistakes as a young man."
"You lied to me. You lied to the world. You going to lie to God now?"
Jamison took a breath. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this. You have my word on it," he said.
She rested her hand on the banister, just above where his hat rested on the mahogany knob. Her eyes were downcast and he could not read her expression.
"Colonel?" she said.
"Yes?"
"You started to say I reminded you of someone."
"Oh yes. My mother. I never realized how much yo
u look like my mother. That's why you'll always have a special place in my heart."
Flower stared at him, then picked up his hat and placed it in his hand. "Good-bye, Colonel. I won't be seeing you again," she said.
"Pardon?" he said.
"Good-bye, suh. You're a sad man," she said.
"What? What did you say?"
But she stood silently by the open door and refused to speak again, until he finally gave it up and walked out on the gallery, confused and for once in his life at a loss for words. When he glanced back at her, his forehead was knitted with lines, like those in the skin of an old man.
When he got into his carriage she saw him produce a small whiskey-colored ball that looked like dried honey from a tobacco pouch and place it inside his jaw, then bark at his driver.
WILLIE Burke's return journey from Shiloh had been one he did not measure in days but in images that he seemed to perceive through a glass darkly-the emptiness of the Mississippi countryside that he and Elias traversed in a rented wagon, a region of dust devils, weed-spiked fields, Doric columns blackened by fire and deserted cabins scrolled with the scales of dead morning glory vines; the box that held Jim's bones vibrating on the deck of a steamboat and a gaggle of little girls in pinafores playing atop the box; a train ride on a flatcar through plains of saw grass and tunnels of trees and sunlight that spoked through rain clouds like grace from a divine hand that he seemed unable to clasp.
Willie's clothes were rent, vinegary with his own smell, his hair peppered with grit. He drank huge amounts of pond water to deaden his hunger. When the train stopped to take on wood he and Elias got into a line of French-speaking Negro trackworkers and were given plates piled with rice and fried fish that they ate with the trackworkers without ever being asked their origins. At a predawn hour on a day that had no date attached to it they dragged the box off a wagon in front of Willie's house and set it down in the grass. The sky was the color of gunmetal, bursting with stars, the surface of the bayou blanketed with ground fog. "Come in," Willie said.
"I think I'll go out to my mother's place and crawl in a hammock for six weeks," Elias replied. His face became introspective. "Willie, the next time I say I'll help you out with a little favor?"
"Yes?"
"Lend me a dollar so I can rent a gun and stick it in my mouth," Elias said.
Willie walked into the house, not pausing in the kitchen to either eat or drink, and on out the back door to use the privy. He dragged Jim's box onto a wagon at the barn, shoved it forward until it was snug against the headboard, then began stacking bricks in the wagon bed. The stars were fading from the sky now, the oaks along the bayou becoming darker, more sharply edged, against the fog. He heard footsteps behind him.
Tige McGuffy heaved a wooden bucket filled with cistern water across Willie's head and face and shoulders.
"Good God, Tige, what was that for?" Willie asked, spitting water out of his mouth.
"You trailed a smell through the house I could have heat down on the floor with a broom."
"Would you be going out to the cemetery with me this fine morning?"
"Cemetery? What you got in that box?" Tige replied. But before Willie could speak Tige waved his hand, indicating he wasn't interested in Willie's response. "The Knights or them White Leaguers lynched a fellow last night. A bunch of them rode through our yard. Where you been, Willie? Don't you care about nobody except a dead man or a lady ain't got no interest in you? Why don't you wake up?"
AT the school that same morning Abigail Dowling noticed the circles under Flower's eyes, her inability to concentrate on the content of a conversation. During recess Flower shook a ten-year-old boy in the yard for throwing rocks at a squirrel. She shook him hard, jarring his chin on his chest, squatting down to yell in his face. The boy lived in a dirt-floor shack with his grandmother and often came to school without breakfast. Until today he had been one of her best students. The boy began to cry and ran into the street.
Flower caught him and led him by the hand into the shade.
